Needed: new home rule law

To the Editor:
It is time to end Albany's 30-year old gas drilling monopoly and at the same time, end the state's home-rule charade. Faced with hydrofracking-related environmental and health risks, local elected officials need the tools to carry out their constitutional responsibilities.

The New York State Constitution mandates that local officials provide effective self-government and protect the safety, health and well-being of citizens. But they lack the explicit legal power to do so.

Several decades ago, the state Legislature gave the Department of Environmental Conservation total control over where, when and how gas drillers operate in towns and villages. Why? Because the drillers wanted a one-stop, DEC-run monopoly that would team up with the industry to promote gas and oil production in New York. The last thing the gas drillers wanted was to deal with local health and safety concerns or zoning ordinances controlling where they could drill.

Today a home rule movement is sweeping the state, as many municipalities react to the prospect of a state-authorized gas-fracking boom. Their reactions are:

The Home-Rule Innovators. Unwilling to trust their health and environmental fate to others, some local officials, champions of America's self-rule traditions, are busy passing gas drilling bans and moratoriums. Here we find such restrictions in Syracuse and the towns of Camillus, Marcellus, DeWitt, Onondaga, Elbridge, Skaneateles, Spafford and Tully in Onondaga County, and more than 60 other municipalities in New York, including the towns of Dryden and Middlefield, where drillers recently lost challenges to drilling ban ordinances. In each case, the courts concluded zoning ordinances that ban drilling did not violate existing state laws.

The Wait & See-ers. More timid towns and villages mumble over and over that the innovators do not have the legal right to ban fracking. These officials sit and wait for the legal haze to clear or the frackers to arrive.

Frack Me Now Officials. Not all officials are worried. Where individual property rights trump community-wide health and safety rights, elected officials content with the status quo eagerly await the frackers.

A 2008 study prepared by the state Commission on Local Government Efficiency and Competitiveness put the problem this way: ''Many would argue that true 'home rule' exists only if there is some constitutional curb on the power of the state to deal directly in the affairs of a local government. Despite being described as a home rule state, and the protections that the constitution purports to grant local governments, localities actually have little immunity from state intervention.''

Rather than rely on court cases to say where a town's powers begin and end, a new law is urgently needed that explicitly gives municipalities the authority to control fracking. Two fracking-related home rule bills are being debated in the Legislature. One would amend the 1981 environmental conservation law and allow local governments to enact and enforce zoning ordinances establishing where drilling is and is not permissible.

Its passage will give local officials the ability to decide for themselves whether or not to greet the drillers with open arms, or to tell them, ''Thanks, but no thanks.''

Ronald Fraser, Ph.D., lives in Colden, and is a member of the town's environmental planning board.